Vehicles for many years have been adapted and modified to assist in the harvesting of agricultural products. Even with the assistance of vehicles, harvesting of certain crops, particularly small and delicate fruit such as strawberries, are extremely labor intensive.
Strawberry harvesting requires the backbreaking work of many laborers. Boxes, referred to as flats, are used for collection of the fruit. For a typical strawberry field, workers will carry the empty flats and harvest the strawberries by hand, placing the gathered fruit into these flats. When filled, each flat is typically carried to the edge of the field where they are palletized with other flats. The carrying of filled flats is extremely inefficient; particularly when the flat is filled near the middle of a field. A worker must carry the flat, sometimes in muddy conditions, to the end of the field and then return to continue picking fruit. Studies have shown that lost time attributed to carrying loaded flats to the end of a field for palletizing can reach 30%.
Once palletized, the strawberry flats are then transported to a facility for refrigeration. Prior to wholesale distribution, it is a typical industry practice to cool the freshly picked fruit to about a temperature of 35 degrees F. To obtain this fruit temperature, strawberries harvested at 70 degrees F. will require approximately 3 hours to cool while strawberries harvested at 50 degrees F. require only 20 minutes.
The harvest season for strawberries can last approximately 6 months. It is typical industry practice to reinspect the strawberry plants every three days and harvest the ripened fruit.
As stated earlier, various vehicular designs have been used in the prior art to assist laborers for harvesting fruit. One of these prior art designs was disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,292,784 issued to Abatti et. al. Abatti et. al. teaches a vehicle which utilizes a pair of conveyors which can span many rows of plants. The vehicle was designed for harvesting large produce such as watermelons.
One problem associated with vehicles utilizing elongated conveyors is that the turning radius of the vehicle is the wingspan of at least one of the conveyors. When the vehicle reaches the end of a row, the field must have sufficient clearance to permit the vehicle to be turned 180 degrees and aligned with rows next to be harvested. The increased turning radius of the vehicle can be a problem; especially if used in fields having space limitations. If insufficient space is available, the vehicle can not be turned without first removing or disconnecting at least one of the conveyors. Although it is possible to implement, this would be an extremely inefficient use of time.